Extracting big data from the internet to support the development of a new patient-reported outcome measure for breast implant illness: a proof of concept study

PurposeIndividuals with health conditions often use online patient forums to share their experiences. These patient data are freely available and have rarely been used in patient-reported outcomes (PRO) research. Web scraping, the automated identification and coding of webpage data, can be employed to collect patient experiences for PRO research. The objective of this study was to assess the feasibility of using web scraping to support the …